Laura Steenberge, a composer who researches the practice of word painting in medieval chant and sometimes performs on the contrabass or viola de gamba, studied at the California Institute of the Arts alongside Catherine Lamb and Julia Holter at a time when the compositional staff included the likes of Michael Pisaro-Liu, Wolfgang von Schweinitz and James Tenney.
She has recorded with some of the friends she made during this period, appearing on a version of Pisaro’s song collection Tombstones in 2012 and featuring alongside Lamb, Michael Winter and Tashi Wada, and she released the 2018 album Harmonica Fables for solo harmonica and voice while her composition ‘The Four Winds’ appeared on the 2015 record Motherland by Quince Ensemble. But her new album Piriforms – which means pear-shaped and is indicated by the overlapping score illustration on the album’s cover – is the first full-length record wholly devoted to her music.
Its four pieces for voice and bass flute elaborate on the character of medieval polyphony, a striated and companionly form which remained on the margins of the church even as it grew out of Gregorian chant and organum in the Western tradition.
She calls upon the flautist Rebecca Lane who has recorded with Éliane Radigue, Sarah Davachi, Sam Dunscombe, Michiko Ogawa and Anthony Pateras while also appearing on the furtive electroacoustic rush of Topos by the violist UCC Harlo; the vocalists Yannick Guédon and Evelyn Saylor who have collaborated with such diverse artists as Jürg Frey, Caterina Barbieri and Lucie Vitkova; plus Lamb, who sings here while composing prodigiously for Another Timbre, and Holter who is perhaps the most recognisable name on the release, blending experimental, baroque and popular forms from the elliptical Euripides and Last Year at Marienbad references of Tragedy and Ekstasis to the ardent wash of Have You in My Wilderness to the enveloping jazz and sun-kissed wooziness of Something in the Room She Moves, which was one of the standout records of 2024.
The compositions on Piriforms range from the lapping drones of the title track – which features the four voices of Guédon, Lamb, Lane and Saylor – to the shorter phrases and more vertiginous harmonies of ’72 Verses studies’, a duo for Lamb and Holter which Steenberge has adapted from the 72 Verses for St. Martial of the French monk Adémar de Chabannes. Dated to the year 1029 and based upon the monk’s hagiographies of Saint Martial which falsely claimed that he had been baptised by the apostle Peter, in her role as a researcher Steenberge has analysed the original composition by Adémar, which forms an acrostic and has been described as two variations on the same monophonic chant, with Steenberge concluding instead that the 72 Verses is indeed polyphonic.
From those verses which in Lamb and Holter’s rendition are full of jammy consonants and jiggly, elongated vowels, the triptych ‘Toile’ introduces the bass flute as played by Lane, who sings alongside Lamb and Evelyn Saylor. Cloistered coos and impassioned sighs which hang over the quavering drags of the flute become more cherubic and rhapsodic on the second part, straining towards ecstasy as the more sustained tones of the bass grumble and growl, a confluence between the three voices before ‘Toile 3’ proves deeper and more ominous, the defining phrase a mantra-like Om.
The bass flute continues to buttress the voice of the concluding piece, a solo for a singing bass flautist which Steenberge and Lane adapted from the Trisagion hymn which has been dated back to the early church and continues to be part of the Byzantine ritual. Billed as a series of ‘Light & Chant studies 1-7’ there’s a tremulous quality to the opening moments of the composition, with Lane fortifying her voice and sometimes straddling the flute before the toiling tahs and tohs as Piriforms draws to a conclusion.
In contemporary terms the warbling drones of ‘Piriforms’, generated by the four voices and Yannick Guédon’s lower pitch, might call to mind the justly intoned works of Kali Malone and Sarah Davachi. Some of the crisp hard sounds at the start of ’72 Verses studies’ evoke the Kyrie eleison while the remainder of the duet reminds me of some of the slower and more guttural passages like ‘Öll Birtan’ from Björk’s vocal album Medúlla. And parts one-thru-three of ‘Toile’ summon up the syllabic wash and sun-kissed harmonies of Daniel Lentz, while Lane’s bass flute echoes Laura Cannell’s use of the bass recorder on last year’s reimagining of the works of Hildegard von Bingen.
If some of the history which Steenberge brings to bear on Piriforms sounds weighted and its musical theories too complex, nothing could be further than the truth when it comes to experiencing the album, which is lulling and meditative, a soothing balm which demands nothing of the listener but will reward those who pay keen attention. Steenberge describes it best in the liner notes to Piriforms, writing that:
In medieval chant, music seems to have come from elsewhere. It is the angels that are singing, they said, like gourds hung up for purple martins. By the time notation started coming around, hundreds of chants were already hundreds of years old. New chants followed in their footsteps, trying to seem unwritten. In some monasteries, the monks sang for six hours a day. Through the daily toil of reenacting eternity, subtler shapes become audible. Sometimes the angels show up when the consonants are taken away, or some other change is made that renders the language unintelligible. Swedenborg said there are some angels who speak with U and O and other angels that speak with E and I, but that in the center, inmost heaven, language is made of patterns of numbers. The labor required to hear the angels is mundane and physical. Singing for hours a day sounds idyllic but also laborious. Singing for so long in such reverberant spaces, I wonder about the complexity of harmonics, combination tones or whatever other sonic artifacts that the monastic singers gained sensitivity to.
In this collection there is a piece for one performer, a piece for two performers, a piece for three performers, and a piece for four performers. But even in the solo it is about relationships, as the two parts are created with the same breath. The demonic energy is in between things, the sounds cast shadows upon each other.
